Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (6 page)

The Last Poets were one of the most important cultural forces in black history, and I was right there with them. At times a big talent agency like William Morris would come by to check them out—not with a white agent, of course, but with a black assistant. The “wolf in a sheep’s clothing” approach did not sit well with the Poets. So when a white record producer named Alan Douglas called and said he wanted to work with them, they were suspicious and hostile.

They told him to meet them at 137th Street and Lenox. There he found a schoolyard with two blacktop basketball courts and a couple dozen black guys staring at him. As he cautiously approached, the crowd parted like the Red Sea for Moses. Revealed underneath a basket were four Last Poets—rappers Abiodun, Jalal, and Bin Hassan, plus Nilija playing the congas. They instructed Douglas to stand at the foul line, and right there and then they performed their best material. Douglas, who also produced Jimi Hendrix, was so impressed that he drove them to a friend’s studio and recorded an album that afternoon.

The Last Poets’s self-titled debut album sold half a million copies, largely by word of mouth, because it sure was not going to get much radio airplay. Their whole vibe, not to mention the track “When the Revolution Comes,” had a tremendous impact on many artists, including Gil Scott-Heron and his “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

But the Last Poets would fall apart. Money has a way of corrupting people. “Whitey” was supposed to be the enemy, but whitey had the money. Some people began to consider the Poets to be sell-outs. Others, including some of their own members, began to treat the Poets more as a business than a movement. Mix in a few jail sentences, and before long their moment had passed, though their legacy remains to this day.

I performed at benefits anywhere at any time for anyone who would have me. Harlem Youth Federation for the legal defense of the Harlem Five, billed below Askia Muhammad Toure, a pioneer in the Black Arts Movement? I was there. The Uhuru Festival sponsored by the Black Arts Freedom Library? I was there, billed below the Third World Poets and Black Nation Quintet but ahead of the Universal Messenger of Drums. Black Spring for the Afro-American Studio for Acting and Speech? I was there. An Evening of Jazz, Films, and Poetry headlined by saxman Pharoah Sanders? Call it A Night of Blackness or Black As We Are, and I was there, baby. A Free Affair in Honor of Sayeed of the Harlem Five Out on Bail (seriously, that was the title) was held five months after the first benefit, which apparently had been successful. Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown was a guest. I was the comedian.

Occasionally someone would wonder why there was a comic on the bill. But especially on the road at colleges, even though the students wore berets and dashikis and Afros (I never could grow one), I found that audiences were still black people at heart—people who love to laugh at themselves and their lives.

One thank-you letter read, “Your performance was beautiful and it relayed to the audience the power and beauty of our Blackness.” Yeah, we used to talk like that. The city of New York even invited me to be a judge for the Miss Harlem Contest! Forget friends with benefits; this was benefits with benefits.

I met most of the leaders of the movement, including those with the Black Panthers. But the Panthers were formed and strongest in California. They were from Oakland and did not translate to New York and the East Coast quite as successfully. Stokely Carmichael, however, was one of us, a New Yorker. He moved from SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) to the Panther Party and was responsible for popularizing the term Black Power. Stokely was very smart. I was impressed that he had gone to the Bronx High School of Science, where you had to pass a test to get in. Some of us rarely passed a test when we were
in
high school.

Stokely started out believing in integration, but by the time we crossed paths he was into his “Back to Africa” phase.

“You know, Stokely,” I told him with a straight face. “There are a lot of white people who would love to see this ‘Back to Africa’ thing happen.”

He did not find that amusing. He got pissed and said, “Walker, maybe you are not relevant to the revolution.” He was probably right.

Stokely was a very serious guy, taking everything so hard. Life to him was black and white—and everything white was evil. He was the kind of radical who objected to using white toothpaste. But he was one Panther who said what he meant and meant what he said. In 1969 he did go back to Africa.

The Panthers earned a lot of good will in the black community because of their free-breakfast program for kids. Though launched in Oakland, the program soon had kitchens operating in cities across the country, feeding more than ten thousand children every day before they went to school. The Panthers helped instill self-worth in the black community too. They talked about standing up for ourselves, that sometimes we can’t turn the other cheek. They talked about not looking for a handout; sometimes we need to do things for ourselves. I could not disagree with that. Power to the people!

The rallies I performed at were very militant affairs, with the Panthers blaming all of the problems of the black man on white society. After one rally in the rain, when I used my Superman joke, I heard one Panther say, “The white man made it rain!”

Another common saying was “The telephone is for white people. A black person uses the drum!” When someone yelled during a rally, “Down with the white devil!” the Panthers’ white lawyer, William Kunstler, would stand up and scream, “Right on!”

My act was definitely antiwhite as well, though I have—excuse the expression—“blacked out” most of those particular jokes from my memory.

I love to see white folks who don’t work. Make me feel so good on the inside. “Why don’t you go get a job? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! I’m tired of paying taxes for people like you!”

But all I wanted was stage time. So did everybody else. When Stokely would get going, he’d speak for an hour and a half. He was a star, as was the incendiary Rap Brown. The women were strong too. In truth, I thought Kathleen Cleaver was sharper than her husband Eldridge. And when Angela Davis was there, she would close the show. She was young, pretty, flamboyant, and a Communist. Whites had Jane Fonda; blacks had Angela Davis. They would wait hours on a hot day in the park to see and hear her finally. But they would first have to see and hear me:

The brothers tell me that our women, our black women, should always be ready to have sex with us so they can populate the world and there will be lots of us when the revolution come. The other day I get into a fight with my girlfriend. She tells me, “Jimmie, when it comes to you, I think I’m gonna take time
off from
the revolution.”

There were some in the movement I had my doubts about—opportunists who believed a little of what came out of their mouths but also knew what to parrot in order to get through. They hopped on the Black Power train for the chicks and the cash, and make no mistake about it—there was a lot of both. Not for me, of course. I was just the comic.

In the summer of 1968 the Panthers invited me to entertain at a series of seminars and workshops in Chicago. I was given the title Official Comedian for the Black Panthers in the East. I didn’t know if anybody else had a title, but I had one. Much of the leadership was there: Bobby Rush, Elaine Brown, David Hilliard, Fred Hampton, and the Cleavers among them. They were getting ready for the Democratic Convention. And all the talk was about how “The Man” was after us, about conspiracies and spies. I didn’t think I was that significant or important for J. Edgar Hoover to care about. But I was there, and I’m probably still in an FBI file today.

One night after a rally a group of us went to Fred Hampton’s apartment in Chicago. We knocked on the door and waited a couple of minutes. A woman cracked it open as if we might be burglars. She recognized a few of the others and let us in. The place was barren—a few chairs and a couple of lamps without shades turned on. Incense was burning.

Hampton was young, just twenty years old, but he had a commanding presence. When he brought together a number of militant groups, including the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and Red Guard Party, he coined the term “rainbow coalition” long before Jesse Jackson borrowed it.

I sat with a couple of folks in his kitchen while he and others went into the living room. After more than an hour they rejoined us. Fred said matter of factly, with no fear or panic in his voice, “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around. I think they’re going to kill me.” “They” was the FBI, CIA—the US government. I was shocked. Why would they want to kill this guy? As we got up to leave, Fred hugged everybody, including me. It was a goodbye hug. I thought he was crazy about being targeted for death, that he needed to take a chill pill.

Later that summer, along with the rest of America, I watched the riots at the Democratic Convention on television. I would see certain Panthers get arrested and I would think, “Wow, I know that guy!”

A year later I was back in Chicago, opening at a club or theater, and I turned on the TV for the news. They said a Black Panther leader had been killed—it was Fred Hampton. They reported that the Chicago police had gone to Fred’s apartment and been attacked. The police then shot him dead. When I returned to New York and went to the East Wind, the story was different. They said Fred and his pregnant girlfriend were sleeping as the cops busted in. They shot him more than fifty times.

The truth was hard to find. Race colored everything. But Hampton turned out to have good reason to be paranoid. Uncovered later was the fact that the FBI was keeping tabs on him and the others, tapping their phones and infiltrating the group. I did not know it at the time, but William O’Neal, Hampton’s bodyguard and the head of security for the Chicago chapter of the Panthers, was actually working for the FBI.

I, however, was not a militant. Nor was I a “Negro,” which was a putdown. A Negro was someone like Aunt Inez. Her older generation, though they had experienced abuse from whites and talked about it all the time in private, would personally apologize to white people about the Freedom Riders and those in civil rights marches. When I was in Birmingham, Aunt Inez would tell white people, “I’m sorry. I don’t know about these young people today. They have nothing to do with us.”

Call me a Negitant. I was where most blacks were, like most people usually are—in the middle. I was just not that angry. Why would I be? I had not been around many white people to start with and had truly never witnessed whites treating us badly because of the color of our skin. The black people I was around didn’t spend our time wondering what the white people were doing to us. I didn’t believe white people were out to get us; I figured they had other, more important things to do. In fact, the whites I had come into contact with—my friends from the ballpark and teachers at SEEK—had actually helped me.

I heard what the Panthers and the Poets said, and I took it all in. But what they were yelling about was not part of my reality. As Godfrey Cambridge joked,

You people aren’t going back to Europe, and we aren’t going back to Africa. We got too much going here.

I believed in Satchel Paige’s line: “Don’t look back—somebody might be gaining on you.” I wasn’t looking back.

The Last Poets finally got me to the Apollo. Frank Schiffman, the owner, and his son Bobby didn’t want them to perform there because they felt the Poets were too antiwhite and the crowd might get out of control. Even Honi Coles, the famed black tap dancer who had become production manager at the Apollo, objected. But the local community put on the pressure, and the Last Poets were booked—and so was I as their opening act.

My mother had first taken me to the Apollo when I was a child. I remember seeing Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the Harlem singing group who had the massive hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” and later Sam Cooke and then James Brown when he truly was Mr. Dynamite. For someone in the ghetto, going to the Apollo was like a Jew going to Jerusalem or a Muslim going to Mecca. I never dreamed that someday I would be on that legendary stage. Although my mother had been upset with me about my career path ever since I quit the post office, she got over that disappointment in her son on the night I played the Apollo.

Well past midnight, long after the show was over, I hung around after everyone else had left. I walked on stage, still wearing the khaki safari jacket that was becoming my trademark. The one small lamp traditionally kept lit was the only illumination. I stood at center stage and thought about where I had come from and where I was now. Pure joy washed over me. I reveled in my moment, and, well, the moment was cool.

Soon I would get used to being on that stage—not as an opening act but as an emcee. I became one of two regular emcees, along with the unrelated and bald Roger Walker. But I wanted to do more than introduce acts. So I’d do my jokes too. Some artistes did not appreciate that.

The first night I worked as emcee was for a show with Wilson Pickett and Joe Simon. I did my bit, got my laughs, and then introduced Pickett with as much flair as I could muster.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know him, you love him—welcome Wilson Pickett!”

Pickett, who was hugely popular, did his show, including hits like “In the Midnight Hour” and “Mustang Sally.” Immediately after he exited to his dressing room, the stage manager found me and said, “Mr. Pickett wants to see you in his dressing room.”

I thought, “Great, he probably liked some of my comedy and wants to compliment me.” First I returned to the stage for some more jokes and to introduce Joe Simon: “Ladies and gentlemen, you know him, you love him—welcome Joe Simon!”

Then I went to Pickett’s dressing room.

“I thought you were the emcee,” he said coldly.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I’m a comic too.”

“You emcee, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“You’re the guy who brought me on?”